As for “clueless”, well, the dinosaurs probably thought those inconsequential little mammals were clueless too. I don’t speak for the rest, but Space Access has been talking about the problems that led to the current Exploration quagmire for twenty years now. We’ve been pushing the solutions too. People are finally starting to listen, and change is beginning to happen.

Me, I’m much too polite to call dinosaurs “clueless”. Y’all sure do seem nervous lately though!

Again my apologies, as it did jump out at me enough though that I did comment on it several blogs.

“If SLS is going to get built, I want to know exactly what Congress is committing us to.”

That one is easy:

“can access cis-lunar space and the regions of space beyond low-Earth orbit in order to enable the United States to participate in global efforts to access and develop this increasingly strategic region.”

I hope this clears things up for you.

Let’s do the math. 1 tablespoon is about 10 grams. So SLS, lifting 70 mT to LEO, could (including the very lightweight urns to keep the ashes separate — um, we want them?) makes for about 7 million tablespoons. There are about 2.5 million deaths per year in the U.S.. So if EVERYONE did it, we’d need an SLS launch rate of one every 2-3 years. Hey, that fits!! We could throw a piece of everyone into space. Talk about serving the taxpayer …

— Donald

As Egad notes above from Marcia S. Smith article ( http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/future-of-nasas-human-spaceflight-program-dominates-nac-meeting ), Tom Young of the NASA Advisory Council and former Director of Goddard Spaceflight Center just stated about SLS, “We are collectively perpetrating a fraud”

Given this fact, it appears that someone is indeed “clueless” and it is not the people on our side. In fact, a more apt description of those who refuse to accept the evidence (whether they like or not) is “self-delusional”

I did not say that we were.

Your point is a good one. For individual projects, yes, it is Congress’ responsibility to fund what the President proposes. (SLS is a daft exception, of course.) But for top level goals, Congressional perspective matters. Is human spaceflight important because colonization of the solar system is important? If so, why? What national needs are served? What is important to the nation? Sorry, but putting human footprints on Mars are not, in and of itself, important to the nation. There has to be some greater context. This is what Authorization bills are supposed to do — put big projects in a national needs context such that their value transcends one year of appropriation.

I will agree with you that this President (and most of his predecessors) have put little effort into articulating how human space flight meets national needs. GWB’s “Vision for Exploration” was a nice effort, and exactly what we need to see more of, though GWB walked away from that effort pretty quickly when it descended into the pit of Constellationism.

“Maybe President’s ARM is a complete waste of money (no irony intended), but if so, at least it is a relatively cheap waste of money compared to the SLS.”

Let’s see. We’re supposed to feel good about that? If we’re going to waste money, we should pat ourselves on the back that it’s not a lot?

http://www.spacepolicyonline.com/news/future-of-nasas-human-spaceflight-program-dominates-nac-meeting

At the top level, the response today was the same – that NASA is developing a plan that is not executable. Some members said they want to know what NASA can do with the money it can reasonably expect, while others wanted a realistic assessment of what it will actually cost to achieve the goal of getting people to Mars by the 2030s. Tom Young said he felt that “we are collectively perpetrating a fraud” by pretending the program is executable. He said he worries that the country will spend $160 billion on human spaceflight over the next 20 years and be only “negligibly closer” to landing humans on Mars.

Indeed.